Category: Drawing

Pond Dipping

pond dipping

Newmillerdam lake, 10.15 a.m., 62℉, 16℃, 90% alto-cumulus: Looking in the net after a sweep beneath the nettles and alder, I appeared to have caught nothing but debris and a single pond skater but when I transferred my catch to the old washing-up bowl that I’d brought with me, I saw a tiny black water beetle swimming around and an equally small water mite, trundling around like a character from a speeded-up silent film.

Most intriguing was an irregular fleck of plant debris crawling determinedly towards the edges of the bowl: a caddis larva in its protective case, just over a centimetre long. With this cumbersome camouflage, to change direction it had to do a three-point turn.

Skaters

Pond skater’s eye-view.

There’s a slight anticlockwise current swirling around the bowl, and I’ve noticed that the skater has decided on a favourite spot and is making little hops to stay in position. Looking closely, this little pond skater is accompanied by four even smaller companions. All of them favour this side of the bowl.

The largest skater pauses to groom its longest limb, brushing it with its shorter back leg. Its two short front legs resemble antennae and it keeps them in contact with the water surface to detect the vibrations of potential prey items, such as a small insect trapped on the surface film. It also keeps tabs on its companions, zipping forward to chase a smaller rival away, the pond skater equivalent of the dodgems.

On the opposite side of the bowl I notice a little group of water fleas, each smaller than a printed full stop. They bob up and down individually but seem to favour keeping together in a in an irregular cluster.

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Categorized as Drawing

The Nature of Lawns

My sketchbook spread of found objects picked up on a lawn has an autumnal feel. We’re not quite there but on a dull August day there’s a feeling that the end of summer is looming.

Fine rain this morning picked out orb webs with glistening droplets.

sketches of lime leaf, snail shell and feathers

I started this page at a family get-together yesterday afternoon in West Melton, near Rotherham, in a garden with several lime trees, planted in Victorian times. There were hundreds, probably thousands, of the limes’ helicopter seeds strewn over the lawn but so far not many leaves. This green heart-shaped leaf may have been torn off the tree in recent high winds but, because of the prominent damage, I wonder if the tree deliberately jettisoned it in an attempt to rid itself of whatever herbivore was starting to nibble holes in it.

Sketches of bluebell seedpods, dandelion seedhead, apple leaf and snail.

The robust bluebell stem with upward-facing seedpods is probably Spanish bluebell, which was often planted in gardens but which has naturalised and in some places threatens to oust our native species.

Wood pigeon feather

Basic Walk

It’s our British summer and people are wrapped up against the wind and the rain in Ossett. I used a man in blue from my sketches as the walking character in my Clip Studio Paint animation, drawn on my iPad Pro.

It’s a very basic animation and I can see plenty of bits that I need to improve on but it’s a way to get familiar with the process so that I can go on to something a bit more expressive.

Sweet Peas

sweet peas
sweet peas

As the lockdown eased at the beginning of February, I couldn’t resist buying a packet of Spencer Mixed sweet pea seeds to sow indoors on my desk in the studio. I set them off in toilet roll tubes but as I was using garden soil from the greenhouse they had a bit of competition from seedlings of chickweed and sowthistle growing up amongst them.

iPhone sketches
Drawing of house in Adobe Fresco

The sweet peas were drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Wet Blotting Ink’ brush for adding the colour. The brothers above (one morphing in a Pokemon character) were drawn in the iPhone version of Fresco, using a Bamboo stylus, as, so far, you can’t used the Apple Pencil on an iPhone screen.

The house across the road is another iPhone Fresco drawing, this time using Fresco’s appropriately named ‘Grungy Inker’ pen. I wonder if a matt-surfaced screen protector would make drawing with a stylus on an iPhone more controllable.

Arum Berries

arum berries

The ripening berries of the cuckoo pint look like bunches of party balloons. These were growing in a small group by the roadside but in the wood, where it grew with tropical luxuriance in the spring, we don’t see any berries.

For English school children, it’s just the beginning of the long summer vacation but there’s an end-of-summer feeling as we negotiate an overgrown footpath between the seedheads of shoulder-high false oat grass, stooping to avoid overhanging stems of bramble.

meadow brown

This meadow brown, enjoying the honey-scented flowers of creeping thistle alongside the footpath, looks a bit the worse for wear. One theory is that the eye-spots save the butterfly from serious injury because a bird would peck at them but it looks as if whatever attacked this butterfly went for the hindwings.

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The Water Margin

brush drawing

I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.

Noodler's Ink and Chinese brushes

Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.

close-up of brush drawing

I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.

drawing by the lake

In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.

It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.

Digitally Drawn

Sketches Pro

As for once I hadn’t taken my sketchbook with me, I literally drew with a digit yesterday, using a finger on my iPhone screen in Tayasui Sketches Pro (left) as we sat with a mint and lime drink in the shaded courtyard of Horbury’s Flamingo Teapot Cafe but after all the large-scale pen and watercolour work that I’ve done for my Redbox Gallery show, I felt that it was about time I tried drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro again.

The man in the hat and the sumac were drawn in Adobe Fresco, using its virtual ‘Blake’ pen for the drawing.

Paperlike

Would I find it easier if I used a matt screen protector, like Paperlike, on my iPad, to give it a more natural feel? Or a rubberised tip for the Apple Pencil, to give it a hint of resistance as it moves over the glass screen?

Adobe Fresco sketch

Drawing on the iPad is never going to be as familiar to me as pen on paper but I’m keen to have the best possible image so I’d have to avoid any matt screen protector because it adds a very slight amount of colour fringing to the image.

Heads Up

grids for copying drawing

It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.

Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.

Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.

Look forward to turning the board right side up.

On the Grid

I’ve started on the main characters for my Redbox Gallery, with a cloth-capped Patrick Stewart as Joby’s father and Joby himself, played by Richard Tolan.

rough for Joby illustration

I’ve gridded up my A3 drawing, ready to transfer to A1-size foamboard.

My little rough yesterday was sketchy enough to suggest the figures but now I’ve started defining them more, I’m going to have to tidy things up a bit, hopefully without losing the liveliness of the rough.

stork cut-outs

And what’s this, down at our garden pond? These foamboard cut-out storks might seem too big for a phone box-sized gallery but I’ve checked that out with my little scale-model mock-up and they should fit in nicely. Being white, they should show up well in what can be a rather dimly-lit space.